The present invention relates to a digest image preparing apparatus and a method of implementing the same and more particularly to an image coding apparatus for receiving uncompressed moving image data to produce compressed image data thereof and preparing ranking information.
Recently, plenty of digital compression-coding methods which can facilitate access to multi-media objects such as video and audio have been standardized. Audio compression-coding systems are standardized to MP3 (MPEG-1: Moving Picture Experts Group-1 Audio Layer-3: ISO/IEC11172-2), AAC (Advanced Audio Coding: ISO/IEC13818-7) and the like. Moving picture compression-coding systems are standardized to MPEG-1 (ISO/IEC11172-2), MPEG-2 (ITU-T H.262, ISO/IEC13818-2), MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC14496-2) and the like. These compression-coding techniques enable us to easily handle multi-media objects by compressing them without deteriorating their quality.
On the other hand, the video frame ranking computation method which is one of the video digest techniques ranks image frames constituting the moving picture in order of importance useful for understanding the contents of the moving picture. The image frames having the higher ranking are arranged in order of time to thereby make an abstract of the moving picture. The video digest techniques are disclosed in “Video Summarization by Curve Simplification”, D. DeMenthon, V. Kobla and D. Doermann, ACM Multimedia 98, September 1998, pp. 211-218 and “Event Detection from MPEG Video in the Compressed Domain”, K. Yoon, D. DeMenthon and D. Dermann, ICPR 2000.